Voice. Sympathetic characters. Narrative pace. Dialogue tags. Emotional arcs. These are the sorts of topics we tackled at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In January 2011, I graduated from the low-residency MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults there, and I’m going through serious withdrawal. Maybe blogging will help…

Vermont is a place where critique doesn’t mean line-edits, but means discussing theme and desire-lines and narrative structure and how a writer intensifies or slows the pace. It’s a place where students are encouraged to play while being pushed to write the novel that comes from the heart—the one only you can write because it’s so you—the one so personal and particular that it touches on the universal—on what it means to be human.

Vermont changed me. It changed my writing. It changed the way I read. During residencies, we called it our own little Narnia. Such a magical place. In this blog, I’ll only skim the surface, and will apologize in advance for my “you had to be there” tone which is so hard to block, because, well… yeah…